The conference ended. People went off to get their flights. As an aside, a screening of the HERNoise film was announced. Few of the conference people made it down to the Belmont cinema.

playback > > Gentle exploratory sax improvisations.

Young men who were assisting in the conference, as technicians, welcoming participants etc are hanging out and chatting. A duo plays, reverbed out guitars with analog synth textures; a ten minute improvisation.

Male voice,” I wrote a song last week. From start to finish”.

playback > > Atonal punk guitars.

Male voice, “…Transylvania conquerors…”

“…live…” (Scottish accent).

This is not sound art. An independent cinema bar room. I go outside to smoke and chat to a fireman. Some talk about a collaboration with a member of the Canadian collective ‘Godspeed, You Black Emperor’.

Before coming here to the Belmont, I has an extended conversation with Jonty Harrison, which meant I missed the film screening. He feels ostracised by music, in the academic sense, and as if acousmatic music is being misappropriated by new media, pushing it into places he does not want it to go.

Male voice,”Do you know Angels of Light?”

After talking to Harrison, a short conversation with Dugal McKinnon who gave the presentation on vinyl. He does not own any, nor has he ever listened to music on vinyl. He comes from a background in ‘ants on a page’ composition.

Here, now, a single bearded, intense young man, on his knees, upon the floor, is creating a low distorted drone, somehow with a harmonica. The same model of Behringer desks that were present in the ‘academy’ during the conference are being used her, but attached to a string of guitar pedals. Delay, reverb, distortion. No granular synthesis here. A beautiful listening experience, a long way from the completed objects of Stollery, Harrison et al. Yet…

With a mouth harp, the tones pulse and build.

I think of tall trees, or a view over water. Breath as source, non-linguistics modulated by circuitry. The audience sits close – to performer, to each other. Active, eyes open. A small JVC camera records the action. There are framed pictures on the wall. A mono line of kazoo maintains spaced out beauty.

Neither high art or low.

But in-between. Less a blurring, more a contingent demarcation of personal experience.

Buzzzzz. Ice machine turns itself on.

The performer riffs against this. He is active in his spatial listening.

The magic has been broken.

I consider the body as the site of both oppression and agency. I feel totally alone in this town, yet sound has continued to connect me to a rich experiential sequence of intersecting aesthetic moments, punctuated by long periods of utter banality.

The acoustic, unamplified voice of the performer, a few moments ago an awkward disruption of the circuit-based abstracted beauty, now takes on its own meaning.

The entire audience is male.

“Walking through the sights” (sung)

In fact there are two women, both with partners.

“Walking through the skies on my bike”. (sung)

“Cheers. Thanks”.
Applause.

“Sigh”. From behind me.

The people here are active listeners. Well lit. Serious. Joking. Present. Young and old.

This is not academic music, is it? Is this then low? Fuck you.

Active state, undissipated. For this instant.
I feel no pain. For this instant.

Beating tones eternal. Electricity. Shifting slabs and delicate colours. I sense 600 years of change from summer to autumn, winter to spring.

In its way, this performance modifies what might be possible to hear, and see, in such a place as this. It sounds like part of here. It does not sound like apart from here. It does not sound like apart from hear.
The manager is counting coins from behind the bar.

Low grade Celestion speakers with appropriate sound streaming through them in situ.

Still the bar manager, oblivious, continues to count the silver.

Electricity from the performer, studied engagement. My view of him is blocked by a pillar, which in some ways, I am grateful for.

“This is a semi-virtual environment, later to be made available as an archive”. (male voice).

“How does sound art relate to the audience?” (The first question from the floor).

Kubisch is the first to respond to this. She discusses the audience experience of sound installations, and relates to her own experience of the works shown here, with a particular regard to the work shown by Giancarlo Toniutti, perhaps the most successful of the installations shown during the conference. In experiencing this work, she found herself lying down, in order to filter out the visual from the auditory, in what was a difficult space in which to present work. It seems important to her that sound installations are not exhibited as objects to sit down in front of and to watch. Toniutti joins the discussion with his conception of a ‘sound-site’, an immersive space to enter, intentionally distanced from a dialectical occularity. For him, the ideal environment in which to place work is ‘open and public’ and he is critical of the other installations which repeated unreconstructed visual codes of theatre/film.

The acousmatic composers enter the discussion with Harrison relating the question to the process of composition, where he assumes the role of the audience. He relates his listening during composition, his listening during performance; in public diffusion of his works, he is situated within the audience, embedded within their auditory field. For Stollery, composition is only complete when performed in public.

Keith Rowe, from the perspective of an improvising musician stresses the emotional nature of the relationship. He senses the psychology of the audience, and notes that this is crucial to what an improviser is able to due in a given situation. For Rowe, all performance is site-specific, as every moment is unique.
“In the room is everything”.

Kubisch responds to this with a comment about the visual aspects of site and evokes notions of sensitivity to place and of atmosphere.

It is interesting to hear Rowe articulate his concerns, as the performance he was part of yesterday, I found to be emotionless, self indulgent, tedious and one dimensional. For all his hyperbole about sensitivity to space, context and audience psychology, in no way were any of these in evidence in his so-called performance. He was so involved in his particular processes, in this case running a battery powered fan, that he seemed generally oblivious to not only the audience, and the space, but also to the intention of his improvising collaborators. He is not solely responsible for this, Mehta too, appeared so involved in what he finds an exciting deconstruction of his instrument, that his elephantine trumpeting into the corners of the room, left the world class musician de Saram floundering. I am sure Rowe has a justification in his interest in battery powered fans, there is without doubt some novelty value in playing a guitar with one, but if this fascination with object takes precedence over the necessary dynamics of tone, gesture and interpersonal action and reaction, then where are his strategies leading us?

Second question from the audience – “I feel titles are important in placing the audience in the work, but they also limit possible readings. What does the panel think about this?”

Kubisch: “I think it would be great not to have titles. It’s just pragmatics”.

Rowe: “ Performances don’t have titles, CDs do. For example “Hqrsch” a CD release came from a live recording. I listened to the recording 40-50 times until the title appeared”.

Relation to the experiential ‘what is in front of you’ of work

Kubisch – installation. The space can be the subject, to some extent, of the work.

Peformance as ritual. Applause at the end, reassuring. You know what to expect. Installation cannot be anticipated, and her work is open to may different interactions. For example with her water underground work and old lady, quite normal, would come everyday, lay down and listen to a particular sound.

What is the duration of performance? It begins and ends with a long continuum which can extend for months before and after the actual show.

Rowe, Zen archery example. You must know a process so intimately that you cannot make a mistake. There is no such thing as chance.

Tonuitti – disagress, there is always the accidental. In his installation the low frequencies were vibrating the room – unitended, but interesting.

Final question from audience: ”What do you take away from the conference?”

Kubisch: ”Time out to connect parts of my brain. I got some ideas for some new work”.

Rowe:” I’m not going to know for a long time. There’s something there though. I’m in two minds about such places as this, either to tear them all down, or that these should be the most revered places in society”

Stollery: ”Pride at being able to attract such high calibre musicians and sound artists to our little town”.

Harrison: ”Meeting people from different areas the same field. Some are on the high ground, some are on the other ground”.

Thompson: ”I would like to express my personal gratitude to everyone”.

A gift of a boxed tuning fork is presented to each of the panel members.

“The speaker system consists of stereo pairs, and will diffuse sound from all around the room, and also give the appearance of sound coming from outside the room”.

Pete Stollery | ‘scenes /rendez-vous’

The first piece presented ‘scenes /rendez-vous’ by Stollery is introduced by a film by Claude le Louche. The film was an attempt by the filmmaker to travel a certain route through Paris in a speeding Mercedes with a short period of time. As Stollery’s father was dying, father and son repeatedly watched the film. Following the death of his father Stollery visited Paris and made recordings along the route taken by LeLouche; these recordings formed the basis of the composition. It seemed anomalous, in an acousmatic presentation, to connect the work with the visual domain.

Sketches made during performance.

Washhhhhhhm of white noise sound.

Beep (car horn)

Traffic sounds moving left to right and right
to
left.

Car horn modified into thematic material.

Car horn filtered from all other noise acting as anchoring drone.

Very low bass hum.

Digital scrapes – like bottles being tapped by coins.

A coin spinning on a table – eternal. This is a heavily treated section.

He is working from a score. His piece is much more spatial, the sounds seem much more separated. He is mixing manually on an old analog mixing desk, riding the faders of the multiple stereo pairs.

For this work, the Scottish artist gained entry to a small metal working factory. During his time there he made a series of recordings of working men and machines. In addition to this he obtained off cuts of metal which he then used to create instruments, also heard in the piece.

An immersion in sculpted sound.

A fading in and out of raw source material and abstracted inner processes.

A poetic work operating on a number of levels:

An exploration of this particular room.

An exploration of a specific local context and work environment.

An investigation into the sonic properties of the material used in that workplace (various metals) – he created instruments constructed from waste obtained from the metal factory.

A investigation into the electro-acoustic techniques of transformation.

Further to this, an unexpected spontaneity of performance.

An audience member utters a small moan of appreciation.

I am unable to describe my experience of sound in this context. The material is too rich, too dynamic, too changing, too spatial and shifting to be represented by writing.

A small bat type sound flicks from the left to the right of the room, pricking my awareness, forming connections between underdeveloped synapses.

There is consummate control of sound in a positive sense.

Nothing over the past few days comes close to the sheer poetics of these pieces. What might airlines, bus companies, architects learn from these artists?

Each composer has announced themselves acoustically and succinctly proving just enough to provide an intriguing entry point into the work.

Chimes, gongs, rain.

Wind or a travelling train.

Scrunkle. Leaves?

Small chimes.

Again the physical impression of natural sound.

Modified water – which becomes more so, like a scribbling pen on paper.

Ke – binng.
CHoin – choing – choing

Swellzza.
Bloop – bloop woopa wooopa
Derrehh

Kak cha-cha.

Shaka. shaka.shaka.

Wopple – whoople bloip bloip blop blop

Woip-woip woip woip-woip bubble-bubble

Tubba tuba

Dzzz Dzzz zeeerr

Creak-creak Creak-creak Creak-creak Creak-creak

Dup-dup Dup-dup Dup-dup Dup-dup

Shhhhh

Scribble scrubble scribble

Husshhhhhh

SKribble

D-zee- de-ze, d’ze

Tok
Scraape
Trickle-trickle

Something is now squeaking rhythmically, a mechanism turning. Not loud.

Café sounds. Birdsong. A canary?

Pans being gonged.

Indistinct conversation – male and female.

A click. (Billiard balls?)

Passing traffic, very spatialised.

An aeroplane passes overhead.

An opera singer from a radio in some kind of distance.

Sudden extreme processing. Washes of sounds – source unidentified.

Car horn type sound, very abstracted becomes a choral chant.
It is now fading a w a y.

Whistling. Broken snatches of conversation.

Claking footsteps. A crowd of people. A touch of flute. A touch of fiddle music.

Near-silence

Applause

Jonty Harrison | Unsound Objects

I am watching his fingers flicker over the faders of the mixing desk. It is so beautiful. Detailed. Defined. Dangerous.

Running water. So much ‘waterness’.

He rides the array of stereo pairs as a thunderclap enters. What beautiful power. Powerful beauty.

To see Jonty, clearly enjoying himself in the throes of live acousmatic performance is to understand his problems with academia. This music is intuitive. He is using no score, and he anticipates each sound object, moving them around the room. He is placed in the middle of the audience, the position of best audition. An interaction between composer-player-space-technology-representation.

He twists his head around to map the audio levels front and rear.

Ocean waves. Walking on shingle. Children’s voices. A fade to a bell-like electric tone.
To near silence.

We are in an acoustically designed space, open wooden floored, and wall panels.
“I think I’m getting feedback from putting this on the table”.

Shuffles and snuffles as the audience enters.

Male voice, “It’s great”.

Female voice, “You have to imagine we’ve come on to tremendous applause”.

Mattosian introduces de Saram and begins the story of Xenakis and his traumatic life, which is, for her as a biographer, key to understanding his work. She describes Xenakis as an outsider, a role he felt natural with, and in many ways, he adopted this persona. She sees Xenakis as both a scientist and an artist investigating the world and sonorising the results. He composed in a very systematic way, but balanced this with a great deal of intuition and gave himself the freedom to change his compositions if a more effective solution presented itself to him, that did not fit with his compositional strategy.

Xenakis grew up in Greece, and as a young man was very influenced by Plato and Marx. Following Mussolini’s invasion of his homeland and the subsequent occupation by Nazi forces, he was part of the communist resistance. The social chaos he experienced during this period, was to crop up again and again in his creative works, and this dynamic between continuity and discontinuity is apparent in many of his compositions. Following the defeat of the Axis forces, Churchill attacked and bombed Athens in an effort to drive out leftist forces from positions of influence. Xenakis himself was directly affected by this, he lost an eye from an explosion of shrapnel and was dragged out from a pile of dead bodies by his father.

Slight feedback.

He went into a long period of depression, and was forced into hiding as the right came into power. His father secured him a false passport and Xenakis was able to leave to France where he begin working for the architect Le Corbusier.

He was quickly recognised as a very capable young man, and by 195x had been trusted by Le Corbusier to design the façade of _________, a musically inspired screen of glass.

Picture.

Slight feedback.

At the same time he composed a new piece which used the same principles, namely a modular approach based on the Fibonacci series. Here we see his profound sense of continuity, in this case, a highly original connectivity between architectural and musical composition. He was always inspired by nature, and more specifically the mathematics underlying the continuum of natural order to disorder.

The piece of music which is now to be presented to us is an example of Xenakis’ systematic mathematical approach towards composition. ‘Nomos Alpha’, a piece for solo cello is based upon the rotation of a cube. The piece is in 24 sections, 8 movements in each section, each one being unique.

Slight feedback.

The piece uses glissandi and microtonal beatings in a manner specific to string instrument, as well as extended bow techniques (for example using the back of the bow).

Slight feedback from rear speakers.

“This is Nomos Alpha”.

Unamplified solo cello.

A switching of instruments as the piece requires the lowest string to be detuned an octave. This is an unusual solution.

A second switch of instruments.

Creak of floorboards.

Footsteps receding.

Footsteps approaching returning the detuned cello.

Switch.

Switch. Return.

The sound of the cello scraping the floor as the assistant sits down as quietly as he can.

Little cough from a bald man in the row in front of me.

Someone clears their throat behind me.

de Saram tightens the lowest string. CHunnnNk.

Unanticipated electronic beep from my mobile which gains unwanted attention. It makes me nervous and I almost blush. The man next to me takes off his spectacles in a show of pointed annoyance.

Applause. Slightly more than polite.

She then provides a biographers’ analysis of the work. He argument follows that systematic compositional gridding provided a framework for Xenakis to work through his traumatic experience of wartime Greece. She tells us an anecdote from much earlier in Xenakis’ life which remained close to his heart; an occasion when he was in a tent at night hearing sounds from all around him. She argues that his creative work is a psychological outward projection, recreating a damaged internal universe experienced in a synaesthetic nightmare of sound and light. She goes further to describe Xenakis’ conception of ‘l’effect combine’ and his love of creating son et lumiere spectacles, and his early effort to establish a centre for computer music with an especial emphasis on spatialised sound, as more or less directly related to the personal trauma he experienced during the Allied bombing of his hometown.

Her argument is alluring directly following the intense and fractured experience of hearing Nomos Alpha. Discontinuity is evident, the effect of the work is violent, and providing a vision of an ancient city being bombed by a supposed ally, does give a greater sense of Xenakis’ aims. Listening to this work, not in terms of formalistic musical composition, (harmonic progression, chordal structure etc), but instead as a psycho-mathematical creative engagement by an extraordinary man with the specifics of an extraordinary multi-sensory violence, indicates commonalities with such other real-world elements of sound art discourse as musique concrete, and Cageian ‘all sound’.

The next piece to be presented is ‘Kotos’, a work from 195x inspired by the concept of ‘l’effect combine’

-sky
-clouds
-ocean

The solo cello piece begins.

There is intense listening happening in the room. Some eyes are closed. Heads are bent, almost in prayer. Hands on mouths, stifling speech perhaps. The speech of oneself, and that of others. All silenced in front of such a troubled life, half a face destroyed by Churchill.

Someone’s stomach gurgles at the end of the piece.

Applause.
“We will have a ten minute break”.

I go outside to get some air. The wind is fierce and refreshing.

Returning into the space, a 12 piece orchestra is warming up. A fantastic sound of chaos. Not so dissimilar to the last piece we heard.

People take their seats.

Near silence.

Dok A microphone is tapped. She begins to speak about the last period of his life.
Female voice, “…is this working…?”
“…Bah…I never have lunch…”

In this period Xenakis established an automated music centre where children could draw and hear resultant sound almost immediately.

Slight feedback from clip mic.

“…it’s up to you to figure out how this all fits together at the end of the night.”

This presentation concerns Streaming Media and Network Radio. Of particular interest to me is the selection of two of my case studies as examples, namely Negativeland and Sam Auinger (other artists selected by Byrne are Katherin Roggla, Bruce Russell and x.y)

playback > > Background level of unknown track

Byrne begins his tracing of the topic with the over-familiar citation of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto for Radio, La Radio from 1933. This vision is criticised for its rather utopian scope, and the discussion moves on to a consideration of broadcast as a medium and the essential tension between the visionaries of radio, such as Marinetti, and the political reality facing such artists when working in such a capital intensive domain. Early on in the radio’s history, studios and stations became rapidly centralised, moving away from the participatory, many-to-many networks imagined by Marinetti, to become fetishised centres for the dissemination of dominant discourse to societies being organised to maximise consumption and production. Artists who chose to work in this medium worked under highly restricted parameters, including such standardisations as program length, volume, subject taboos, the use of silence, restricted playlists.

Of relevance to my work, is the means by which the differences by which radio art and sound art can be distinguished. Key works in this area are Radical Radio by R.M. Schaefer (1987), and ‘Towards a Definition of Radio Art (19xx).

“Radio Art is not Sound Art, nor is it Music. It is Radio”.

“Sound Art and Music are not Radio Art just because they are broadcast on Radio”.

How can these efforts to delineate radio art practice be used to articulate similar efforts in sound art?

Keywords: Kunstradio, Austria, New American Radio.

n.b Both of these work within state infrastructure. What is the significance of this?

e.g. Negativeland – Over the Edge – KPFA, Berkeley, California.

Byrne goes on to consider how web streaming has suggested new strategies and possibilities for the medium of audio broadcast. There are questions; is internet streaming Radio Art? Is it a new form? It certainly is not radio. Let us consider the similarities and differences between the two.

This can be much expanded using Shaefer, and the Micro Radio Manifesto, Italy.

There is much of interest in this section, and it moves some way to explain the frustration and annoyance I felt at Hanson’s presentation. His view that the studio as object of discourse as relevant and of interest, reveals itself as an ill-informed and obsolete view of sound practice. Issues of portability, and the very examples of artists demystifying their workspaces that he presented, indicate an alternative position.

dematerialisation
influence of Fluxus, land art, Kubisch working in situ.
Sound art for mobile phones – who presented this – get paper from Bill
Community initiatives

While the artist studio as a trope may well be in evidence in the works he presented, their relevance, and interest is limited in scope, and represents an historically entrenched position, showing little understanding of current practice.

Some thoughts on the use of Soundwalking in the Warwick Bar development project

This group work from a basic interest in the significance of sound in space. He discusses ‘logos’ – and our ocular society.

He introduces a project called ‘swash’ a 24 channel spatialised soundscape that was shown in Torquay, and later remixed into an electro-acoustic performance. Other projects they have been involved with include the Churchill Galleries, The Imperial War Museum, Out of Scale, White Out, White Noise, a sound observatory, a device for magnifying the surrounding soundscape, 49 Pallasma, The Eyes of the Skin. As such there basic concern is that of multi-sensory architecture.

He then goes on to describe a project more in depth. The Audible city, Birmingham, Rebranding the East of the City. The site of the project is located in a network of canals, and still remains a rich habitat for wildlife. The economic and development pressures determined that the areas was to be redeveloped sooner or later, and so this group decided to become involved, in this problematic project, with the hope that their concerns with the audible would enhance the project’s development outcomes. Pretty soon in the project they found that their role was not one of producing creative work per se, but rather as a consultant, a position of ‘being there’ and taking part in the meetings that occurred as the project was being planned.

“We would go into a meeting, and they would be discussing how to shave 10 million off the budget. We would show some pictures, then they would continue with their discussions of the budget”.

Bill Fontana has a residency as part if the urban redevelopment. St Martin’s Bells. A sonic mapping project, and deliberate attempt to use soundmarks as a means of creating identity. It is here that sound is being considered as part of the built environment.

The particular site of Liminal’s work was an old banana warehouse, which had also been used as a gun testing site, both of these roles defined by the area’s proximity to the industrial canal transportation.

In an interesting tangent perhaps from the urban planning and high level economic development and board room politics of the preceding part of the presentation, the focus now shifts to the creative outcomes that were produced as a result of the companies’ involvement with the project, namely a headphone based soundwalk. He discusses walking as creative practice, and the importance of this activity, as a research tool in developing a creative response to the locality, and to the concerns of the project leaders. He goes further to incorporate his conceptions of walking with its relation to architecture, and argues that the first architecture were menhirs, built to mark significant locations in early humanity’s travels through a hostile environment. As such they were “places in between, nomadic marks, based in movement”.

In a move perhaps slightly surprising, he moves discussion towards the practices of Dadaist, Surrealist and Letterist artists of the twentieth century ; surprising only because of the ease with which these anti-establishment radicals, are cited with relation to a purely capitalist project of urban redevelopment. However, his interest in the work of such artists, lies in their attempts to break down barriers between art and life, and perhaps such contemporary projects such as this one, mark and inevitable, and perhaps depressing, confluence of art and artists on the one hand, and capital and capitalists, on the other.

He then goes on to cite the work of Janet Cardiff and Hildegard Westerkamp, as influential on his practice and articulates the value of walking as practice for a sound artist involved in such a project as important in two major ways:

1)The way that such a walk is done by a sound artists, is very different to the way that the same route would be experienced by a planner or an architect. The direct concern with and sensitivity to sound highlights sound’s importance, which may reside outside the common frameworks available to urban developers.

2)The activity of walking involved a great deal of audio documentation (field recordings, interviews). For all the hyperbole surrounding the redevelopment, in actuality, this site is under threat (not least by the developers themselves). The activity of documenting the sound environment, fell to the artists, in a ironic moment of complicity.

However, these recordings intended to form the basis of the headphone-based soundwalk, provided the artists with some clear proposals they were able to present to the planners.

playback > >

A cacophony of steel working.

Metal bashing.
“I’ll stop it right there”.

Key points that came from the artists, via interviews with local inhabitants, and field recording included:

1) The mapping of sound levels in the area.
2) Acoustic design – the conception that the designed space could be acoustically zoned.
3) Creation of an archive of sounds that are disappearing from the area.
4) Biological sound design. The introduction of animal and plant species with definite sonic characteristics.
5) Bill Fontana’s conception of sound orientation.
6) The suggestion of an artistic intervention in the area, five years from the present time, once the development has become established.

In conclusion, he describes the value in the group’s involvement in the project, most important was the raising the agenda of sound within the built environment.

“If as much attention was given to sound as to windows and artificial light, then what effect would this have upon a visitor’s experience of space?”

“What is the role of an artist in public art?”

As a postscript, and in response to this question, he describes his experience during this project. Very rapidly he decided his role was should not be one of subservience to the developers, planners or architects; his role was not one simply of spin and an attractive looking (and sounding) plug-in to the project, but rather a position enabling a different perspective on the project’s possible outcomes.

“Hi. In coming here, flying by aeroplane, you get a lovely view of fields. Wonderful stone walls, that look like they’ve taken centuries to build. I thought, “How civilised”. Now I’m going to talk about blurring the boundaries.”

“The challenge for us is to find some way of working the in-between.”

She speaks clearly. Her musical training left her alone when confronting sound art. She introduces her central theme, that of ‘ ecriture feminine, a French post-structuralists project that speaks of ‘writing the female body’, and proposes an approach to writing informed by fluidity, fragmentation, and joissance, which are, it is argued, embodied in, and by the female body. It was a refusal to comply with existing forms of writing; Joyce traces this trajectory of nascent post-structuralism in the early 1970s, and joins this with moves within musical discourse away from the formalisms of serialism, a reshaping of discourse demarcated by the contrasting strategies of Boulez and Cage. The French feminists proposed a new way of reading, an approach that would preserve the essence of the strangeness of each text.

“There are as many ways of reading a text as there are readers”.

Joyce moves on to introduce the work of Maryanne Amacher, and plays us an except from ‘Head Rhythm 1’. She provides us with a projection of the wave form.

playback > >

“We have to play this loud to get the effect she’s looking for”.

Some people put their fingers in their ears.

“Now I’ll skip to the middle part”.

My ears begin to emit sounds as much as taking sounds in.

Joyce then provides a strong formal analysis of the composition’s structure.

“Boy, I sure read this paper faster at home, than I am here”.

She relates Amacher’s work to that of the Feminist post-structuralists, and argues that goal of ecriture feminine is not a masculine obsession with domination and consolidation, but a radically feminised agenda of dissemination. In regard to Amacher’s work, Joyce proposes that her work has no relation to the traditional high art score, nor to text. There is no report to dominate, and Amacher, by cutting into existing forms, she deconstructs them.

Kubsich “I found Maryanne’s work very loud, very vibrating. I went around with her at her recent installation (Berlin, Singhur Gallery?), there were sounds coming from places you can’t hear. At the install festival (get location, year) her performance was very visceral”.

Male voice, comment from audience, “I thought I was going to have a flashback, I thought I was going to be sick. It was great”.

Hanson begins with a well known anecdote from the Tate discussion list. A rather unfunny quote from Douglas Kahn.

I can’t understand him.
His accent (French?) is obscuring his words.

“My objective is not to define, but to engage dialog between sound art and sociology.”

He draws a rather spurious parallel between sound artists entering the realm of institutional visual art, with that of sociologists entering the art world.

“…restaging of studio space in public galleries…using the examples of Bruce Nauman and Matmos.”

He is hard to understand. He is rushing his words.

Garble. Garble. Garble.

“…structured network…”

The audience has their heads in their hands.

“The modern sound artist’s studio puts the composer in the same position as the painter in front of his canvas. i.e. working directly with sound.

The rhythm of his speech is irregular, fractured. Is he not confident? I don’t feel confident in what he is saying to me. He halts, backtracks, and allows himself smug asides. He taps along to a movie of Bruce Nauman’s ‘Mapping the Studio’ (1968). Is that part of the presentation? He pauses for water. His throat is dry. He IS nervous.

“Am I alright for time?”

Thompson : “10 minutes.”

“Cool.”

Thompson : “That’s a question.”

He rushes through Nauman and now we are with Matmos. Their piece ‘Work, Work, Work’, is used as an example of restaging the studio in a public space.

Mutter. Mutter. Mutter.

In this piece Matmos installed their studio in a gallery and interviewed the first visitor of the day, which they used as the basis of a composition, which they created in front of gallery visitors, with the aim of revealing their working process. Their motivation for this was because many electronic artists, in their words, and Hanson’s, think they are “splitting the fucking atom or something.”
“…in the artists’ studio, or the post-artists studio, if you will…”

“…the phenomena of sound art…”

“…unease at the sight of sound…”

“…so I’m going to listen to Matmos now…”

“…shut up…”

playback > > A piece of Matmos.

After the piece finishes, Hanson wants us to applause.
We hesitate.

Questions from the audience.

Someone asks about portability and mobility in this era of the laptop.

Hanson: “What do you want me to say about this?” (bluntly with disinterest)

Talk turns to Markus Popp (Oval) designing his own software.

Stollery makes an observation that new PhD electro-acoustic composers have not been showing interest in the facilities available in the studios of the institution here in Aberdeen. They are technologically self sufficient, and are much more likely to work from their own home or portable systems, only using the university for final mixes and mastering.

Kubisch, “…normally I improvise. This time I have been writing. An interesting process.”
“I was asked how everything was starting…”

“Cageian stillness…”

“No-one invented sound art…”

“Trace the roots…”

Kubisch is tracing a personal history of sound art, using examples from her own work, alongside the work of two long standing colleagues, Bernhard Leitner, and Hans Peter Kuhn.

Her narrative is linear and begins in the nineteenth century, a period where scientists, engineers and inventors were developing the technologies that were to become so important to sound art practice in the twentieth century. She then jumps forward in time to the 1970s, and argues that a similar period of invention and innovation was occurring at this time within the domain of new media.

In this way, she connects practice to technological development within broader society. Leading up to this period, she cites certain technological inventions, which she sees as important as both facilitating and limiting tools available, to varying degrees at varying times, to those involved in creative sound practice.

In preparing for this presentation, Kubisch requested pictures and sound files from both Kuhn and Leitner. Though both were prepared to provide pictures, neither were comfortable in providing sound. Kuhn especially connects the sound with the specifics of the site, and does not allow decontextualised representation of sound work. What is the distinction he is making here between visual and sonic material?

She is describing her early career. She was trained as a flutist, and early work dealt with extending her instrument along Cageian lines. She was working with deconstructing her musical practice; playing with boxing gloves metal thimbles, or contact microphones on her fingers.

“People were wanting to break out of traditional set-ups, such as this lecture. I now have to perform for you all”.

This is a pertinent moment of self reflectivity.

She describes her uncomfortable position at this time. She felt unlocated, most sound artists, like her colleagues Leiter and Kuhn, were not from a background in music. Their concerns were architectural (Leitner), and theatrical (Kuhn). Anecdotally she refers to a gathering of 100 artists for a sound art festival in Berlin 1996. Of this group, only 6 formally identified themselves with conservatoire styled musical training.

As the 1970s progressed, her distance from music, in a formal sense, grew, although she remained performance based, and entered an extended period of collaboration with video artists. The use of video works, and associated hardware, along with multi-channel speaker setups provided different possibilities for performer and audience, some distance from the institutionally supported, and culturally assimilated norms of serious music.

“The role of multimedia is to break up reality”.

playback > > A recording of such a performance.

Weoo Weeo Weeoo Weoo

Oscillating siren flute.

“In performances we placed speakers around the room in different places”.

She finds it strange to hear the playback of these recordings in this clinical environment. What were spatialised, contextualized, emotional and visceral performances, are now being experienced through two Genelec speakers, supported only by a PowerPoint slide, and her words.

By the 1980s, many artists who had been working independently, more or less in isolation, during the 1970s, began to meet each other, and some form of exchange and dialogue began. Technological developments, as outlined above, opened up new possibilities and many artists were creating their own equipment, wiring circuitry, developing their own tools, raising important questions about the artist as a technological designer, and the location and process of art-making.

She shows a slide of a Leitner piece from 1980, an 8 channel sound room for one person. She recalls being impressed by the simplicity, and subtlety of the work.

In 1987, she was invited to a university studio, and was able to use a computer for the first time. It was used to manipulate sound material, and the 24 hour wait, while the machine processed her data, obtained results that excited her hugely.

Le cylinder sonore

“In this kind of magic space, natural sounds, slightly modified are mixed with everyday sounds from the garden and the street”.

Speakers and lights were installed in waste piles of industrial glass. A nearby warehouse was once used to house artworks forbidden and confiscated by the Nazis. A large speaker was installed on the top of the building reciting this same, previously banned, Expressionist poetry.

Still at this point, there were few places where she had the opportunity to exhibit. Her work was seen as fine art by musical discourse, and as being too musical from the perspective of the fine art world. As a consequence, she found herself travelling a great deal, and she, and her work, toured many festivals (get specifics). This had a positive effect in bringing artists together, and a (small) network of practitioners began to grow.

Accompanying this economic and creative necessity was the growing importance of site-specific work. It is from this period that she developed a rigorous understanding of site-specific sound installation.

Her engagement with this type of work inscribes a line of flight from her conservatoire background. She became interested in creating spaces for people to listen to music without duration. She left the conservatoire and spent 2 years studying electronics. She discovered electromagnetic induction during this time, and presented her first induction piece in Sicily.

In this piece, cables were used to electromagnetically transduce two sound recordings made on a local beach. Audience members were given small cubes containing receivers and speakers, which allowed them to hear the dematerialized sound. As they moved around the space, they were also moving within, around and between two sound fields, mixing the sources through physical movement.

“The audience became active”.

By 1987, Kubisch, had developed wireless headphones, that provided the audience with a sonically more immersive experience of her invisible sound fields, and she presented work in an outdoor installation at Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria.

playback > > ‘On Air’. Cassette published 1983.

Sine wave falling. Loop.

Electronic squeals like seagulls.

Lower pitch signal.

“The aim was to create sounds that could not be identified.”

“There was another piece made with little toy computers”
playback > >

Casiotone beat.

“Why” – digitally synthesized voice.

Delayed ‘primitive’ synth tone. Loop.

|—-| |—-| |—-| |—-| |—-| |—-| |—-| |—-|

At this time, in the late 1980s, Kubisch was working laboriously with tape. This type of work is familiar to the older generation of electro-acoustic composers present. Acknowledgement of shared technological and physical historic processes passes unspoken between the sound artist and the composers (Stollery, Harrison, Wyness).

As the 1990s began (and Kubisch takes care to highlight the artificiality of categorizing historical narratives into 10 year blocks), so started, what she calls, the “era of high definition”. The profound technological developments of this period, created new modalities.

“Virtual, imagined spaces, became more important than reality”.

New works became worked out in virtual spaces (the web, within software, within hardware) rather than originating within the analogue specifics of a room. Whilst sound installations would be fine-tuned once placed in the site of reception, much work was created at distance, both in a physical and metaphysical technological sense.

“Throughout the 1990s, there was a tendency to create large spaces with power and beauty.”

1999 Bernhard Leitner – ‘Acoustic Architecture’

“…like a sound forest…very dense…very beautiful.”

Kubisch found herself working in the context of theatre due to financial pressures, as well as continuing her installation work.

When connected to solar power, they malfunction and sound like crickets.

By the turn of the millennia, developments in sound art had become so rapidly changing, as to make it difficult for a practicing artist, such as Kubisch, to keep abreast of the shifting terrain. She cites web music, and web art in a more general sense, to be very important 21st century innovations. With the involvement of many younger artists, curators, festivals and sympathetic institutions, so definitions of sound art, became much looser. She mentions sound installation as a case in point.

Leitner – 2000 – Sound serpent.

Kubisch had given up her electromagnetic induction work at this point, she had become interested in other areas of work. The cost of mounting such installations had also had also made exhibition problematic. However, the support offered by a sponsor encouraged her to reengage with induction work, and she developed a large scale work in 200x

-underground garage. Go though water soundfields, when took off headphones, heard real water sounds. 200 electromagnetic headphones.

Hans Peter Kuhn : Sound carpet.

5 computers
64 channels
26 lights

Visitors walk on a soft carpet, but the sound creates a sense of rapid motion.

“the technology is so cheap, we have to use it.”

In developing this new work, she discovered a startling change in her environment. During the 1980s, she found some occasional electro-magnetic interference from neighbouring sites that would, on occasion, encroach upon her designed sound fields. All of these polluting frequencies were between 50-60 hertz. By the time of her ‘underground garage’ installation she was picking up new sounds, from the electromagnetic spectrum, that she had not experienced up to this point. As she researched this phenomena further, experimenting in different environments (transport systems, shops, offices) and different cities, so she found that more new sounds were coming. This research led to her ‘Electrical Walks’ series of work.

“Nothing sounds as it looks.”

“…as I walk wearing my induction headphones, I am in a different world.”

She notes how the activity of listening modifies the behaviour of the listeners, businessmen listening on one of her ‘Electrical Walks’ can be seen to behave in very un-businessman-like ways.

Electro-magnetic activity sounds very different from day to night, and each city has its own signature. Cities in Romania and Bulgaria for example, who are investing heavily in new technology, with, for example, wi-fi hotspots throughout city centres, sound “very nervous’. New York is so saturated, so dense, so heavy with signal, that Kubisch had to adjust her equipment, as the volume level was unbearable.

There are also global sounds that appear everywhere. One example of this are the scanners placed at the doors of shops to prevent shoplifting. Trans-national chains tend to use the same model, regardless of which country the shop is situated in; these have the same signature.

playback > > ‘Homage with Minimal Disinformation’

A piece based upon sounds sourced from the electromagnetic environment of New York. It was an attempt to create a work inspired by New York minimalism, which was a great influence early on in her career.

Everyone is listening intently. The camera operator shrugs his shoulders at me, as if to say “Like what am I supposed to film, dude?

After about 4mins Troxler seems to want to turn the work off. Kubisch gently defends her turf, with a gentle wave of the hand. The piece continues.

Boop. Boop. Boop. Boop. Boop. Boop. Boop. Boop. Boop.

Boop. Burmp

Sudden end.

Kubisch, “We should have bigger speakers.”

Applause.

In making her closing remarks, Kubisch provides an interesting insight into the economics of sound art. For her, her work is not object based. It is not something to be bought and displayed by art institutions. The nature of her work means that she has to make repeated installations, which are, as discussed above, temporary. This ephemeral, changing, site-specific approach, originating in a period where galleries and music halls were unreceptive to sound work, coupled with the necessity of travel to ‘marginal’ sites, is perhaps a vital dynamic in the generation of theory, practice, and discourse, undocumented within institutional archives, but existing as informal discussions and correspondences between practitioners, at a time when ‘sound art’, as reified object, had yet to appear. She is encouraged by the recent upswing in interest in her work, as funding support necessary for the continuation of her explorations, have, so far, remained minimal.

Questions from the Audience.

The first question is about Lamonte Young.

Kubisch replies that influence of the New York scene was very important in her finding her own voice. Not only Young, but female artists Pauline Oliveros and Annea Lockwood helped her develop confidence, in what was a misunderstood and marginalised practice.

“I was a failed artist, a failed composer, I didn’t know. They helped me.”

Second question is about the U.K. Health and Safety man. Has Kubisch had difficulties installing her work due to such concerns?

“We just did things without asking.”

The third question is regarding the piece constructed from the New York electro-magnetic recordings (‘Homage with Minimal Disinformation’).

“Is it important that people know where it comes from?”

She answers, that documentation, of installation work, is problematic, and so this type of background context is important.

“I just want to have fun. Not just to make spaces, but experiences of spaces [for the audience].”

“I’ve always found that men are more interested in how you make it, women are more interested in how it sounds (jokingly).”

The final question is about how Kubisch works out the relation between what she gives to the audience to complete, and how much control she maintains herself. Kubisch seems slightly annoyed by this question and speaks about improvisation in high art German orchestras in the 1970s.

“I found it stupid.”

“It [should be] a natural process.”

Her earlier work using cables, used to be very neat and orderly. She contrasts this with her recent work, which gives a surface impression of disorder (Below this surface however is a evolved and evolving personal language of carefully created sounds, all the more effective, hidden below a mass a tangled wires). The work is completed by people, who in recent shows have been playing quite freely with the cabling, wrapping themselves up in it, and interacting with the work in a physical and unselfconscious manner. Kubisch ends with saying that she is not interested in control per se, but on how interesting the experience is for the audience.

“I am more interested in chaos [than control].”

“Thank you Christina”.

Applause.
“We will now have a coffee break for 15 minutes, as we tech the next speakers.”

Bonus Track 1) Conversation insert with Joyce Shintani.

Merleau-Ponty. embodiment. electro-acousticians now searching for physicality following the mental abstractions of the structuralists / serialists

Male voice, “We apologise for the delay due to technological and travel problems”. (Peter Stollery).

Stollery goes on to introduce the conference. The school of music here in Aberdeen is located within the School of Art and Education, which has funded this conference. The music department itself was only formed 4 months ago. The music school is in the process of creating an identity for itself; much of this self-definition is centred upon post-graduate activity in electro acoustic and sound art composition.

Rather tellingly, the SoundasArt conference is occurring alongside a festival of contemporary music (s.o.u.n.d.), this indicates the vector from which the organizers here are approaching sound art. An awkward meeting of entrenched academic composers, with the fluid open spaces of sound art.

Male voice, “Do you hear me in your headphones?” (Peter Troxler).

Troxler gives a short presentation providing us with some social context for the activities of urbannovember, the group that has organized the festival. The organization began in 2004 with an open uncurated public art event developed to counter plans by the British National Party (BNP) to march through Aberdeen’s city centre. Their next project in 2005 addressed the locally vital issue of the oil industry.

Male voice (from podium), “…sound and light is being bitted and streamed to everyone who could not afford to travel to Aberdeen, or were scared of the weather.”

One voice. Ending with health and safety.

Awkward switch over of wireless mic.

Bill Thompson greets everyone and provides some housekeeping information. He introduces one of the keynote speakers, Christina Kubisch, who is to speak next.